An eclectic blog on which appears daily one-thousand word essays on somethingorother.

Friday, March 31, 2017

THE CYBER POLICE STATE

Trump on his hackable Android

which he uses to government business at dinner parties.

The most “American” aspect to this unfolding scandal about Trump and the espionage coming from the Russia is the selling of ads for the Rachel Maddow Show — as well as forcing MSNBC watchers onto paid platforms. Like the Washington Post and New York Times “pay walls,” the first beneficiary of the story of our own danger is booming sales.”

Put that aside.

Senate hearings about the crazy unendingness makes it clear that we’re paying for our own childish neglect of the issues of the cyber world, a revolution of technology (among others) that is as life-changing as the industrial revolution. The internet is a millennial railroad, an airport that lands on your table, a harvesting combine that reduces a whole crew to one college kid earning summer money. It was just too subtle to see without re-focusing. There are two schools of thought: if you can find the same motives and foibles, it’s the sameold sameold. The other one is that this is quite different and we need to stretch to get our heads around it.

I was particularly impressed by the Senate Intelligence Committee testimony, though I could only bring up the second half on YouTube. I normally watch a lot of intense police procedural movies — this felt the same. It was adult, controlled, technical but accessible. Nothing else got done at this house except cat feeding so they’d stay out from in front of my screen.

TRUMP with his old Android he uses

to do government business at dinner parties.

Even the schools who are teaching keyboarding and coding, thinking they are giving their kids the ability to use computers, are not providing the thinking skills, analysis and insight they need to REALLY operate on computers. (Trump evidently cannot use a keyboard computer.) What computers can do — besides providing vid games and ordering clothes — is only activated and effective if the person brings a context that is broad and deep. But we seem to be locked into villages of about a hundred people who hate change, which is the way our biology is programmed. It takes some effort and even some help to escape that. All the truly sophisticated testifiers are saying that we just had the wrong focus, weren’t thinking big enough. That includes the Russians.

This might be a clue: the trash roll-off manager, a woman I respect, thinks global warming is an invented issue, not real, and her “proof” is that long cycles of global warming and thawing happen all the time and they are natural throughout the history of the planet. Therefore it is silly to try to interfere. I quite agree that planetary temperature cycles are natural, recurring, and dynamic, but what I finally realized is that she thinks it’s like the weather cycles that I see happening — like recurrence of what happened in the Sixties which I witnessed.

What she doesn’t grasp is that the global warming (climate change) that I see demonstrated in pictures and data is FAR more extreme, maybe not survivable by most humans. And our efforts (though effective to some degree) are focused on greenhouse gases (which is good) instead of preparing for the unthinkable consequence of losing all our fine coastal cities, which will mean major changes inland to accommodate those people. Also, changes in the great gyres of current that warm some countries. It might happen within decades, not centuries. This political crisis we’re struggling with is very parallel.

Over the last half century I’ve seen the institutions that I valued and tried to participate in constructively go straight to near-evil, all the time dressed up and smiling. The UU ministers used to joke (over their laypeople’s heads) about people who would not admit evil existed. It’s not a blind “spot”, it’s a whole denial of an aspect of every human culture. Trump has been acting like Putin through his whole life, but no one nailed him for it. We have seen the Russian enemy and “he” is us, demanding control and respect by force.

I’m glued to Rachel Maddow, but if the profiteering of her thoughts keep escalating, I will have to decide whether to pay or not. What puzzles me is that in the comments — when I don’t block them — how many people, usually female, sneer at her and hope something bad will happen to her. Evidently our reaction, partly competitive, is being so terrified by the news that we try to kill the messenger who says the cops are coming. If the goal of Russia was to take America down a few pegs, the same is true of these curdled watchers. In fact, that seems to be the driving goal of, well, one-third of Americans. “I demand respect! You think you’re so good!”

This vid discusses whether Trump has Alzheimers. I’ve been convinced of the diagnosis from the beginning. I’ve worked in neurology wards that included people with Alzheimers. It’s a distinctive affliction — not like florid psychosis. If Trump admitted it, he might plead innocent due to insanity, but except at the beginning, the capacity for self-reflection is gone. (Assuming Trump ever had any accurate idea of himself, which is appears he never did.) But what about his staff and family? So self-involved that they didn’t notice? Or just tending the goose to get the golden eggs as long as they could?

I can understand Putin deciding Trump was an idiot who could be managed. The intel people are saying that Putin himself was amazed at how easy it was, and yet how impossible it was to predict what would happen next. I can also understand that Trump’s daughter wants to be there in case of something wild happening. She is Ivanka’s daughter and Ivanka is no fool. Those women KNOW that Trump is losing his mind and they must be preparing for it. But I cannot understand why one-third of American citizens would vote for an obviously crazy man and still defend him as he is gradually revealed as also a criminal man.

And yet the greatest threat is the cloud of consequences to our lives as we take advantage of this situation (just as we did with 9/11) to become more defensive, rigid and regulation ensnared. Trump’s fancy flourishes of signing (on an empty desk) have given permission for a lot of people to be hurt, for programs to be destroyed, for invasions of our lives to increase. Already.

I was impressed by the expert testifying to the senate committee (I’ve got to learn all these names) who said that the identification and access cards swinging from lanyards on the necks of half the people in the room did NOT have a true computer chip on them — only a picture of a chip, ineffective. A couple of senators hurried to shut him up. Others were scribbling quickly, probably notes to get real chips ASAP. We settle for the appearance of security — not real security, which is constant human insight and action. “The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.”

This site helps you to guard your info at borders. How long before a traffic stop will mean your handheld is plugged into the main computer for download? When you cross into Canada now, they run your id through their computer to see if you have a record. Where do you think TruthFinder got their program? https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/mar/31/us-border-phone-computer-searches-how-to-protect?utm_source=esp&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=GU+Today+USA+-+Collections+2017&utm_term=219834&subid=10790770&CMP=GT_US_collection